Gramsci and the Postcolonial World

The book under review, while explaining the relevance of
Gramsci’s thoughts in the postcolonial world, deals with three key concerns:
the role of intellectuals, cultural hegemony and neo-liberal political economy.
Drawing upon the above three resources from different geographies in the postcolonial
world, the book draws our attention to how Gramsci’s ideas have travelled
across the globe from Peru, Algeria, India to China and elsewhere.

Anti-Colonial Movements

Showing remarkable sensitivity, the editors draw our
attention to three very important insights of Gramsci that are relevant in
postcolonial studies. First, Gramsci’s critique of the civilising mission is
relevant to us as he, in a rebuttal of the Marxist Labriola, argues that
natives in colonies are no children who gain political wisdom through colonial
education. Rather, Gramsci tells us that natives gain political maturity by
opposing colonial projects. Second, it is so typical of Gramsci that he shows
how it is possible to learn from anti-colonial wars by offering a new paradigm
of war: war of position (ideological and moral criticism), war of movement
(mass movement) and war of frontal attack (armed struggle).

I would go further to claim that Gramsci moves away from his
own binary discussion of politico-ideological warfare (war of position/frontal
attack) in Europe to discover what the editors call “a paradigmatic case” of
war. While Gramsci may be inaccurate for entirely drawing this new paradigm of
war from Gandhian experiments, but his three moments of war are present in
India’s anti-colonial struggle.

In a sense Gramsci, a critique of Enlightenment, sets an
example for his own Marxism, willing to learn from popular movements of the
East. The editors must be given credit for an unusual recognition of Gramsci’s
non-Eurocentric knowledge. I think this interpretation of Gramsci is very
enlightening. Here, if I may add, Gramscian theory becomes relevant to explain
a new configuration of war in post-war Europe’s new social movements, which
largely rely on a war of movement, a conception learned by him from
anti-colonial struggles. Third, the editors argue that Gramsci’s theory of
internal colonialism in connection with the southern question/peasant question
in Italian nationalism has the potentiality to understand Europe’s colonial and
postcolonial politics. For Gramsci the story of exploitation of resources of
the peasantry in the south of Italy by the northern industrialists without
leading to the development of productive forces in the south, offers us
interesting parallels in Europe’s colonial accumulation.

Dialectical Materialism

Most papers in this volume demonstrate how Gramsci’s
concerns and conceptual tools may have relevance in comprehending the
intellectual/cultural project in the postcolonial world. However, there is one
paper that does not argue so. It discovers the spirit of Gramscian enquiry. The
postcolonial world may have different contexts – racism in Africa. A borrowed
model of Gramscian enquiry may be partially valid but usually does not offer
anything on our internal history – decoloniality or racism and struggles
specific to these situations. Therefore, to stay with the Gramscian spirit of
enquiry, it may be more relevant to examine social or cultural contexts where
Gramsci may be useful or not. Just as Gramsci discovers new histories and new
modes of struggle for non-Russian Europe, it would be necessary for us in the
postcolonial world to stay with his method of enquiry and offer similar
departures from Gramsci’s Marxism to understand new forms of power and opposition
– colonialism and decoloniality.

Thus, Walter Mignolo in the last chapter of the book
(Chapter 9) draws our attention to what may be called Gramsci’s geographical
materialism (Said’s expression) as opposed to dialectical materialism which
advocates a universal model of history by suppressing historical and
geographical differences. Mignolo argues that it is not only Gramsci who might
inspire us but also, among others, Mariátegui of Peru and M K Gandhi of India
who could be our inspirations if we ought to concern ourselves with
decoloniality. If I may add, in postcolonial India, the left will have to draw
inspirations from caste critics like B R Ambedkar, R M Lohia, Periyar and
others. I agree with Mignolo that the brilliant Gramsci alone will not serve the
left’s cause if decoloniality, the end of racism/casteism and so on ought to be
its prime concern.

National-Popular

Robert Young (Chapter 1) argues that Gramsci, through his
strident criticism of Italy’s occupation and exploitation of Libya and his
critique of internal colonialism in the southern question, lays down ground
rules of postcolonial thinking. Paolo Capuzzo and Sandro Mezzadra (Chapter 2)
try to demonstrate how Gramscian ideas are received in Italy during the
post-war period.

Gramsci has travelled a long way – from Togliatti’s partial
revival and orthodox appropriation of Gramsci’s ideas during 1950s, N Bobbio’s
liberal use of Gramsci and further to the use of Gramsci in Negri’s
autonomist-workers’ movement during 1970s. Neelam Srivastava’s invocation
(Chapter 3) of Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectual in connection with two
foremost postcolonial intellectuals such as G Padmore and F Fanon adds strength
to this volume. She tries to show how both of them, while being critical of
communism for ignoring black liberation movements, draw inspirations from
Gramsci’s counter-hegemony through culture. Like Gramsci, both stress the need
for an organic connection between intellectuals and masses in order to develop
a strong national-popular movement in different geographical settings in
pan-Africanism.

Baidik Bhattacharya (Chapter 4) draws a parallel between
Gramsci’s secular humanism and Said’s secular criticism that is inspired from
Gramsci. In a brilliant move, Bhattacharya presents Gramsci as a non-realist
thinker and argues that secular humanism in Gramsci is concerned with the
recovery of a global culture of humanity which is not inconsistent with the
recovery of the popular. In his secular criticism, Said is equally concerned
with such a recovery. Both remain critique of cultural hegemonies through
globalisation. Now the following questions may arise. How does Gramsci
reconcile national-popular with secular humanism which goes beyond nation? What
happens to the idea of nation, different geographies, geographical materialism
and so on in Said’s secular humanism? Does post-colony mean a move beyond a
national frame? Does nationalism always invoke imperial projects? Why did
Gandhi, Mao, Fanon and Padmore fight for a new nation?

Of the Weakest Links

Ian Chambers (Chapter 5) tries to locate different practices
across religious communities and tries to identify common sense in order to
transform it to good sense in different modern-Muslim communities. He suggests
that modern ideas of public good and social justice have a complex history in
diverse cultural formations that cannot be grasped by hegemonic Orientalism
that reduces their importance by imposing liberalism, individualism and
anti-cleric secularism.

Partha Chatterjee (Chapter 6) highlights a new concern while
interrogating India’s experience with neo-liberal political economy. He argues
that there is a move away from the split between the state and peasantry during
the pre-liberalisation period, to a new split between civil society and
political society. Thus, the structure of India’s passive revolution is shifted
from a coalition between the capitalist class, landlords and middle classes
during the pre-liberalisation phase to a coalition between corporate capital
and urban middle classes in civil society during the liberalisation period.
While Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution is still useful to explain the
process of hegemony, his concept of contradictory consciousness is no longer
valid as the state is no longer an external entity vis-à-vis the peasantry. The
state and developmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) together form
part of governmentality which has penetrated within peasantry/informal sector.

The split between civil society and political society
corresponds to the split between corporate capital and non-corporate capital.
The state pursues two kinds of policies – the policy of primitive accumulation
for the corporate capital and the policy of welfare governmentality for the
non-corporate capital to maintain hegemony over informal sector/peasantry.
Various kinds of peasant resistance adopting violence are utilitarian and want
publicity in media in order to get appropriate government benefits (p 132). The
split between the left and the right is virtually not there as the current demand
is now to implement welfare governmentality (p 133).

Chatterjee’s analysis of the changing story of India’s
passive revolution may be partly correct. However, he forgets to add, a la
Gramsci, that if passive revolution is still carried out, capitalist hegemony
remains the weakest. The structure of domination/coercion appears more
imminently than that of hegemony/consent. The penetration of welfare
governmentality remains weak in India today. Only a fraction of the rupee spent
on anti-poverty programmes reaches the poor, according to Mani Shankar Aiyar,
the former minister of panchayati raj and rural development. So, despite many
developmental NGOs working as extensions of state power, welfare
governmentality still remains an externality in actual practice. Wherever
primitive accumulation projects are envisaged in India, methods of coercion are
more visible.

Dalit Struggles

Pheng Cheah’s work (Chapter 7) on Jia Zhangke, the Chinese
film-maker, both reconfirms Gramsci’s usage and challenges some of its
assumptions in the changing context of commodification under transnational
migration in post-socialist China. Jia’s recent films portray the plight of
peasantry and migrant labour in a rapidly globalising China and tries to
connect with their life stories which are lived through by the film-maker who
is variously described a “migrant film-maker”. His films provide double gesture:
first, they expose the myths of globalising China by showing the degraded life
of migrant workers in towns and second, they stimulate a counter-hegemonic
element by projecting how the migrant workers try to build a shared
space/community through care rather than self-interest.

The next essay by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (Chapter 8) uses
two literary texts – Bharathipura by U R Anantha Murthy and Kuruthi Punal
(River of Blood) by Indira Parthasarathy. These texts are used to show how two
different kinds of social struggles demanding temple entry of dalits, one led
by a brahmin intellectual and the other by an organic intellectual for higher
wages for dalits met with failure and consequent retaliatory violence on dalits
by brahminical forces. Sunder Rajan shows how in both cases, the role of
political leadership of the intellectuals – one by a déclassé intellectual and
other by an organic intellectual – may be problematic in anti-caste struggles
in south India. Following Gramsci, she correctly argues that in these cases,
the failure of subalterns needs to be seen as a “crisis of authority” of
brahminical forces and the detachment of subalterns from traditional ideologies
of caste/class systems, thus providing a sort of interval in actual historical
process.

The Gendered Subaltern

In the epilogue, the interview with Gayatri Chakravarty
Spivak clarifies the relevance of Gramsci in Subaltern Studies. She reasserts
that subalterns are not just class collectives but also gendered subjects. As
gendered subjects, the subaltern may exist as a “singular” subject. The
gendered subject allows us to think outside of capitalism, hegemony, abstract
citizenship and agency talks. She claims, “the gendered subaltern lives in
another space” (p 225). Spivak’s language offers many complicated nuances.

While I agree with her, that in extreme situations like
suicide by a woman, subaltern subjectivity may be singular (losing sense of
connection with any social collective), I am worried about her
essentialist/generic use of language. The gender also forms the collective
subjectivity part of hegemony as well as counter-hegemony. Gender aristocracy
may be an integral part of capitalism, whereas gender interlocked with working
class/peasantry may be part outside capital logic and part hegemonised by
capitalism. I am surprised by her silence on the dialectic logic employed by
Gramsci in describing subaltern status. Subalterns – gendered or not – are an
integral part of subjection by ruling classes/patriarchy which in any case
operates collectively rather than singularly. To present power relations or
resistance process as singularity is to defeat the cause of democratic
socialism which Spivak seeks to defend.

However, the present volume is a healthy addition in
postcolonial literature that draws on several ideas of Gramsci who remains its
central focus and will undoubtedly be the point of discussion among scholars
who, like Lenin and Gramsci, must learn from the strengths of the enemy. By
merely talking about the weaknesses of enemies, the left would proceed nowhere
in counter-hegemony.

Arun K Patnaik (akpatnaik1@yahoo.com) teaches at the Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad.

Frantz Fanon

1925 - 1961

This Blog

This blog contains resources directly related to Frantz Fanon's life and work, the secondary literature on Fanon and other resources useful for engaging Fanon's ideas here and now. Some of what is here comes from, or relates to, a particular set of ongoing discussions around Fanon's work in Grahamstown.